Music notation in the form of sheet music, scores and lead sheet is widely available in the form of hard physical copy, whether in the form of an original print or a copy, for example in the form of a print-out of a rasterised scan. Typically, a musician places the music notation on a lectern to play the music. For all but the shortest pieces, this requires the musician or an assistant to turn the pages of the music notation as the piece progresses.
More recently, musicians have sought to make use of electronic devices to obtain and display music notation. As an example, a user of such a device seeking to learn a new instrument or a new piece may download the music notation for the piece, for example in the form of an image file in rasterised digital format, from a website specially provided for this purpose.
In this specification, the expression “rasterised digital format” means any file format that uses pixels to create an image on screen and includes file formats for bit-map images such as JPEG, TIFF, BMP and PNG file formats. Moreover, the expression “rasterised digital format” includes the PDF (Portable Document Format) file format and like formats, which can use rasterized embedded images. Like expressions shall be construed accordingly.
Having downloaded the file, the user may then print the music notation. Increasingly commonly, however, users wish to view the music notation using the electronic device. Such electronic devices include desktop, laptop, notebook and tablet computers, and even smartphones. However, such devices commonly have display screens that are too small to display the music notation full size.
Currently, when portable computers, including tablet computers are becoming the popular choice for most users, screen size limitations are more apparent, hence reading notation on such screens becomes more difficult. For example, the most popular screen size on laptop computers is currently around 13″, which is smaller than an A4 sheet. It would be preferable to display a rasterised image of an A4 sheet of music on a screen size of 20″ or greater.
Thus, the user has two options. First, he can reduce the scale of the image so that the whole sheet is shown. However, even on big screens the displayed notation maybe too small to comfortably be read, particularly given that the instrument may require the user to sit some distance from the display. Alternatively, he can choose to display a larger scale image, so that only a part of the sheet is displayed at one time. However, since the musician may only see a part of the entire sheet due to the limitations of computer screen size, he needs to scroll the page to reveal the hidden part and will most likely need to stop playing his instrument in order to do so.
In either case, the problem remains that music notation can span over multiple pages, hence the need to scroll interactively also remains, equivalent to turning the pages of hard copy.